Swedish sea treasure hunters have found something extraordinary: A 60-foot disc sunk in the bottom of the ocean, with what appears to be 985-foot-long impact tracks leading to it. The team leader never found anything like it:
You see a lot of weird stuff in this job but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round… a circle.
Those are the words of Peter Lindberg, commander of the Ocean Explorer. He and his team found the strange disc on June 19 2011, at 285 feet below the surface of the Botnia Gulf, which is located somewhere between Finland and Sweden in the Baltic.
The Ocean Explorer is not a team of crazy UFO hunters, but a company that finds sunken ships and retrieve their contents for profit. In 1997 they found the ship Jönköping, which was loaded by 2.500 bottles of an amazing champagne: Heidsieck&Co Monopole 1907 "Gout Americain" dedicated to the Russian Imperial Fleet. They sold those bottles for $13,000 a pop.
So what this could be?
Linberg is not claiming this is a UFO but the appearance of the sonar image is leading some people to believe it's a crashed object either made by humans or—dun dun DUN—aliens. I look at the images and all I can think about is "someone get Chewie and Han's bodies out of there."
Click to enlarge.
While the shape may remind you of the Millennium Falcon, a Cylon Raider or a bloody Nazi spaceship from the dark side of the Moon, and the tracks suggest the object destroyed part of seabed on its way to its final position, this could be anything, including a geological formation or, as Lindberg says, some archeological find, some "new Stonehenge."
How a new Stonehenge could be found at 285 feet below the surface, I don't know. And it certainly can't be a manmade object because I'd would assume that any experimental vehicle woud have been retrieved by now by the US or Russian navies.
In any case, I'm sure we will find out. Lindberg doesn't want to spend any money on it "since it might be nothing" but I'm sure James Cameron is on his way armed with his Titanic underwater robots and he will find out.
Assuming the Men In Black don't get there first, of course. [Ocean Explorer via News.com , MSNBC, ABC (In Spanish)—Gracias Estudiante!]